Americanah

The author of Half of a Yellow Sun—winner of the Orange Prize—and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize winner Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns with this dazzling novel, a story of love and race centered on a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices in the countries they adopt. As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under a military dictatorship, and its people flee their homeland if they can. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu departs for America to study. Through failures and successes, new friends and lost relationships, she feels the weight of something she never thought of back home—race. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their passion, for their homeland as well as for each other, they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.

"With this new book Adichie has scaled up, traversing three genres (romance, comedy of manners, novel of ideas) three nations, and within each, a broad swath of social spectrums. It is a book about identity, nationality, race, difference, loneliness, aspiration, and love. On top of [a] familiar narrative scaffolding, a love story, Adichie builds an altogether different tale: one about all the ways we humans fail to love each other.... Adichie notices nearly everything, from how we socialize to what we eat to what we say [and she] has a keen inner ear. She is uncommonly sensitive to the space between people, the way it ripples with all kinds of invisible forces: physical beauty, economic discrepancy, sexual attraction, intellectual appraisal, guilt, resentment, envy, need. In America, she recognizes, the most potent of all the invisible strings—the strong nuclear force of our social physics—is race. Adichie's analysis of that force is specific, damning, clarifying, and comprehensive. She is merciless about white liberal attitudes toward race, with their prevailing mix of awkward self-consciousness, contented ignorance, self-satisfaction, and submerged fear. But she is equally caustic about everyone else's anxious racial jostling. I found myself laughing—ruefully, from recognizing myself and my country, but also delightedly, from recognizing an echo.... In Americanah, Adichie is to blackness what Philip Roth is to Jewishness: its most obsessive taxonomist, its staunchest defender, and its fiercest critic. Stories of immigrants adjusting to the United States are as central to American literature as they are to the American Dream. But Americanah [is] a new kind of migration story: a Great Global Novel."—New York Magazine